Dropout Rates in the United States: 2001

January 11, 2005

Dropout Rates in the United States: 2001 (94 pages, PDF), the fourteenth in the series of annual dropout reports from the National Center for Education Statistics, shows that while progress was made in reducing dropout rates during the 1970s and 1980s, the rates have since stagnated. Five out of every one hundred students enrolled in high school in October 2000 had dropped out before October 2001, with those from low-income families six times more likely than their peers in high-income families to drop out. In October 2001, 10.7 percent of the sixteen- through twenty-four-year-olds in the United States were not enrolled in a high school program and had not competed high school, which is consistent with estimates reported over the last ten years.